I never woulda thunk it. But
there it was. Right at the top of the Op-Ed page of the New York Times -I kid you not!-for
October 3rd: a tabulated summary of the results collated from several
recent Gallup Polls, taken over the course of the last several months,
going back to June of this year. In America today, so these polls
assure us, there are now twice
as many- people who call themselves conservatives as
there are those who proudly wear the label of liberal. And most interesting of
all, for the first time since 1995, when the Gallup Polls began
asking about abortion, there are now more
Americans today who reject abortion as morally wrong than there are
those who support it as morally o.k. The Pro-Life forces are winning
the battle for America's mind. All of which provides good reason
to pray as never before-and to reinforce that prayer with some penance,
too-that our legislatures and our courts may respond with sensitivity
to this growing change in the public attitude, though that response may
not be very soon in coming.

What we see in these polls is
perhaps just a bit analogous to what Winston Churchill perceived back
in November of 1942 to be the import of the American invasion of North
Africa: "not perhaps the beginning of the end, but surely the end of
the beginning".-an important turning point in what had been a long and
discouraging struggle. And let's keep in mind St. Paul's assurance that
"our weapons are not those of th,
flesh, but they are
powerful for the overthrow of strongholds." Witness
the signing of the official document that dissolved the Soviet Union,
with a stroke of Michael Gorbachev's pen in 1991--on Christmas Day!

Here, just slightly abridged, is
the Times Op-Ed.

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The Comfort
of Conservatism
By Charles M. Blow
From: The New York Times Op-Ed
Date: Saturday, October 3, 2009

... A series of recent Gallup
polls has ... detected an uptick in conservative
sentiment across a broad range of measures. For example:

* The party identification
gap between Democrats and Republicans is now the smallest it has been
since 2005.

* There is a "renewed
desire" for government to promote traditional
values.

* An August report saw a
marked increase in the itumber of people who want immigration to
decrease.

* A June report found that conservatives are
now the largest ideological group, outnumbering liberals 2 to 1....

* A May report found that
for the first time since Gallup began asking about abortion in 1995, more Americans are now anti-abortion than
[are those who, are] supportive of abortion rights.

Is this a reaction to a new
Democratic administration in general or to President Obama in
particular? Maybe it's the manifestation of something more deeply
rooted in our behavior.

A hundred and fifty years ago,
Abraham Lincoln. framed conservatism thusly: "What is conservatism? Is it not adherence
to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" It
was and still is. Conservatism for some is a collective mooring against
the waves of change. It is a reflexive reaction to uncertainty.

The Obama administration's
response to the financial and automotive crises and its pursuit of a
wide range of reforms is the epitome of new and untried. Major change
has come much too quickly for far too many. The response: retreat
to a cocoon of conservatism.

Nothing illustrates this better
than the health care reform debate. Fear of change and the uncertainty
it brings is driving a large portion of the opposition. A Kaiser Family
Foundation survey released on Tuesday found that the top three words
selected by those in favor of reforms to describe their feelings were
"hopeful", "optimistic" and "positive." On the other hand, the top
three words used by those opposed to reform were "frustrated,"
"confused" and "angry."

This fear and frustration put feet into the streets. Some simply
protested the health care reforms, but others vented their cumlative
angst. It was a conservative catharsis ....

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The occasional special significance of major anniversaries has always
fascinated me; these anniversaries can often serve as useful benchmarks
for the tracing of progress or decline. Last year's fortieth
anniversary of the publication of Humanae
Vitae is a case in point. By 2008 the grim social results from
the Catholic world's rebellion forty years before against the Church's
teaching on contraception are now very hard to deny. So, too the recent
observance of the sixtieth anniversary of the Communist conquest of
mainland China affords grounds for cautious hope for a continuation of
an evolution more benign than would have been thought possible when the
fortieth anniversary was observed. But another major anniversary-one
fraught with reason for concem-would have escaped my attention
altogether had it not been for an interesting article that I came upon
in the national edition of The
Washington Times, written by family affairs columnist Cheryl
Wetzstein. She points out the dreadful consequences that have flowed
from the signing of a document in the bellwether state of California
back in 1969 by the governor of the state at that time. Like the
slightly earlier rebellion against Humanae
Vitae the signing of this document constituted yet another
violent shock to marriage and the family, the bedrock institution on
which the stability of our nation (or of any nation)
rests. The governor who signed the document was none other than Ronald
Reagan. (He later described this action as the worst mistake he had
ever made.) The document that he signed was the "No Fault" Divorce
legislation that had been passed by California's legislature. May I
share with you here Cheryl Wetzstein's comment from the September 28,
2009 issue of The Washington Times.

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This month marks the
40th anniversary of the earthquake that rocked the American Family.
The Washington Times
By: Cheryl Wetzstein, September 28, 2009

Such an anniversary deserves to be remembered.

On September
4, 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan signed a "no-fault" divorce
law.

California
wasn't the first state to pass a no-fault provision-that honor went to
Oklahoma (1953), followed by Alaska (1963) and New York (1967),
according to the 2004 Handbook of Contemporary Families. But California
was the first state to cast out "fault" in divorce entirely and replace
it with "irreconcilable differences."

Within 15
years, every state had followed suit in some way, and the so-called
Divorce Revolution was on its way.

What motivated people to enact no-fault divorce laws?

One reason was that, in a fault system, a
divorce required at least one spouse to prove that the other had
committed adultery, abandonment or abuse. This meant hiring a private
detective and/or collecting incriminating evidence for the court.

Or-and this happened far too often-couples who both wanted the
divorce had to resort to manufacturing
evidence-faking abandonment, for instance. This kind of fraud insulted
the court, legal professionals complained.

And then there were the genuinely ugly divorces, in which both spouses
hurled blame and evidence at each other. Everyone suffered, including
the children.

Thus, the noble purpose of no-fault divorce was to remove the
contentious, annoying legal requirement for couples to prove anything
other than their desire to divorce. After all, the thinking went, if
marriage was the union of two people, and one person wanted out, then
the union was no longer viable.

Except that
wasn't the whole story

The key to understanding the problem is to recognize that the grounds
for divorce did not go from fault to no-fault, they went from mutual consent
to unilateral,"
said Allen Parkman, University of New Mexico economics professor and
author of books on divorce.

Under the fault system, "most divorces were negotiated and eventually
[were granted] based on mutual consent," Mr. Parkman said. But once one
person could legally end the marriage, "there was no longer
any need for negotiations."

The 40 years
of divorce-on-demand has left a "poisonous legacy," wrote W. Bradford
Wilcox, University of Virginia sociology professor and director of the
National Marriage Project, who detailed his observations in an
article in the new National Affairs
quarterly.

Divorce expert Judith Wallerstein said in 2005 that the number of children
affected by divorce was one million children a year, since 1973. These
young people's passionate, even pathological, fear of divorce continues
to reverberate through the culture via rampant cohabiting and delayed
marriage.

Going back to California's 1969 no-fault law, it appears that it was
also a case of the personal becoming political.

According to "Stolen Vows" a 2002 book by Judy Parejko, the California
lawmaker (James A Hayes) who championed no-fault divorce was embroiled
in a bitter divorce from his stay-at-home wife, the mother of his four
children. Removing fault didn't help Mr. Hayes in his divorce, but it
certainly crushed the "negotiating power" of other stay-at-home wives,
Ms. Parejko wrote.

And when Mr. Reagan signed the bill, he was apparently still smarting
from his 1948 divorce, which actress Jane Wyman obtained because of his
"mental cruelty." Mr.
Reagan later said signing the no-fault law was "one of the worst
mistakes he ever made in office," son Michael Reagan wrote in his book,
"Twice adopted."

Michael was
3 when his father and Miss Wyman divorced. His description of
divorce-"where two adults take everything that matters to a child-the
child's home, family, security, and sense of being loved and
protected--and they smash it all up, leave it in ruins on the floor,
then walk out and leave the child to clean up the mess"-- still
resonates today, fault or no-fault.

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And speaking
of major anniversaries, was it the deliberate intent of the
White House to "twist the knife", so to speak, in the collective memory
of the Polish people, or was it simple ignorance, that prompted the
current administration to choose, of all days of the decade, precisely
the seventieth anniversary (September 17th) of Russia's stab-in-the-
back invasion of Eastern Poland in the opening phase of World War II as
the day on which to issue an announcement to the world (an announcement
transmitted to the office of the President of Poland via a telephone
call in what in Poland's time zone was the very dead of night,) to the
effect that an agreement of strategic importance, previously endorsed
by the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic in concert with the
preceding American administration, was now being abruptly cancelled.
Little wonder that the President of Poland, thus doubly insulted,
declined to accept the call. This was the agreement that had called for
the positioning of anti-ICBM defensive missies on Polish soil with the
requisite controlling radar to be located in the Czech Republic. The
cancellation of this agreement leaves the eastern seaboard of the
United States now deprived of what would have been its only defense
against the likely threat in perhaps not too many years to come of
Iranian ICBMs armed with nuclear weapons. In view of Iran's
rapid progress thus far in the science of rocketry-in this very year of
2009 it has successfully launched a space satellite and has
demonstrated an existing capacity to fire medium range, solid-fuel,
mobile missles that put all of the Middle East and much of Europe
within the sphere of danger-America may come to regret this repudiation
of a signed agreement more quickly than many would like to think. And
of course there is now the widespread perception that two of our most
loyal but smaller allies have been "thrown under the bus" to appease a
more powerful next-door neighbor, a perception that may be less than
reassuring to yet others among our smaller allies, Israel included. And
to think that it's still just early days. Oh, well, in the meantime,
have a good week. And pray for our country.